Commentary: Voters have spoken; no more GMOs

Harry Cline | Apr 12, 2004

MENDOCINO COUNTY, Calif. - The folks of this beautiful northern California county can rest easy now. There will be no Frankenfoods planted in their backyard.

In March, anti-GMO activists managed to get almost 57 percent of the county’s voters to ban bio-engineered crops. It was hailed as “an act of defiance against corporate stronghold of America’s farmland.”

Big deal. Voting is easy. When are you anti-GMO types going to get serious about protecting yourselves against dastardly killer tomatoes?

You 56.5 percent of the voters need to march right down to Wal-Mart, Mervyns, Nordstrom, Sears, Eddie Bauer — wherever you shop for clothes — and demand that all cotton clothing be removed from the shelves. It was probably made from fiber produced with herbicide resistant cotton, maybe even Bt-cotton. Now go to your closet, collect all those nice, comfortable jeans and cotton shirts and burn them (on burn days, of course). Now support your cause by buying new polyester shirts and pants to tend your gardens, sweating profusely in your new found political correctness.

Milk? Stop drinking it. It probably came from cows fed silage produced from herbicide-resistant corn or whole cottonseed. You don’t need milk to survive. Be correct and drink water only.

Those delicious grain cereals you enjoy? Dump them in the trash! They were made from grains totally unlike the wild corn, wheat and oats scientists first began working with to give the world highly productive grain crops grown today. No, there are no “GMO” crops in cereals, but science was used to commercialize wild grains, the same science that is developing “GMO” crops.

As a matter of fact, quit going to grocery stores. Every food item in those terrible places was developed with the same scientific goal as used in developing biotech crops. Yep, even your organic foods. Where do you think “natural” pest resistant varieties came from? The science of plant breeding.

Doug Mosel, spokesperson for the Mendocino Yes on Measure H campaign said Mendocino County folks care “passionately” about where they live. Passion, smassion. Get serious Doug. Voting is easy. Not eating is the hard part. Where is your conviction?

Voting to ban bio-engineered crops is ludicrous and an insult to science. No one has proven GMO crops harm anything.

Unfortunately, this movement is as threatening as it is absurd. Activists in other rural Northern California rural counties are thinking about following Mendocino’s lead.

Bill Van Skike, president of California Planting Cotton Seed Distributors, calls this movement a threat to the state’s cotton industry. It is a threat to all California agriculture. Van Skike is correct when he says it will take grower and credible scientific involvement to derail this movement by a handful of “partially informed activists.”

Science is being thwarted by this anti-biotech movement that makes a lot of noise with no credible evidence to support its cause. It is all about anti-business.

The latest movement is from an area where marijuana was once called the biggest cash crop. You do not go wandering through unfamiliar Mendocino County rural gates. Makes you wonder if there would be such a hue and cry if someone bioengineered herbicide-resistant marijuana?